Performance, Fit, and Retention: Inside the Talent Density System with Mike Goldman

Welcome to Friday, the burnout podcast.

I'm your host, Kate Dunnevin, burnout expert, keynote speaker, and author focused on burnout

as a match issue at work.

Fried looks at burnout as information, not failure.

When people, roles, expectations, leadership behaviors, and systems fall out of alignment,

burnout is often the signal.

Seasons one through ten of fried focus primarily on individual burnout and recovery, and those

episodes are still available.

You can use the fried episode finder to find the conversations that best match what you're

dealing with right now.

Starting in season 11, the focus shifts to the workplace.

The conversation center on how leaders and organizations can improve match and get rid

of burnout in realistic, sustainable ways.

I also work directly with companies and events through burnout and emotional intelligence

keynotes, workshops, and longer-term advisory work.

If burnout has been getting your attention, this podcast will help you understand what

it's pointing to and how to find a better match.

I am very excited today to introduce you to not only a good friend of mine, but someone

who has created something that I honestly believe can change the business world and how

we do a very particular thing that most leaders think is kind of bullshit.

So we'll get into that in a minute, but today you get to hear from Mike Goldman, who is

a leadership team coach, the author of three books, including the USA Today Best Seller

on multiple weeks.

The strength of talent.

He's a TEDx speaker and speaks internationally to groups of business leaders, such as

IBM, All-State, the Young Presidents Organization, Entrepreneurs Organization, Vistage International,

and is it Tech Canada or TEC Canada?

Tech.

Tech Canada, because there's no H at the end, so I didn't know.

Now, it is really TEC, but everybody says tech.

Okay, fair.

Stand for something.

This is not a good thing to have in your bio.

You should change it.

All right.

Let's cut.

Let's stop.

Do this all over again.

Nope, we're keeping it.

He's also the host of the better leadership team show during his 35 year, 35 plus year

coaching and consulting career.

He has worked with clients, including Disney Verizon, Chanel and Polo Ralph Lauren.

You may have heard of one or two or all of those.

His insights have been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and Chief Executive Magazine.

And he is widely regarded at by CEOs as the expert on building great leadership teams.

Mike, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

It's about time.

You've been on my show twice.

Now I'm finally on yours.

Listen, some of us have better things to share than others, folks, and just so you know,

Mike and I actually do spend quite a bit of time together.

This might be a slightly more sarcastic episode than you're used to, because that's just how

we relate to one another.

All right.

First things first.

I foreshadowed this not very well in the beginning that I think that you have something

that could literally change the way businesses run.

And when I was reading your book, even though I had heard about it for the whole time you

were writing it, we talked about it every month.

And like I knew a lot about this book.

And even still when I read the book and then I also listened to the podcast episodes you

did on the better leadership team show about the book.

And when I was listening to it, I got a little bit jealous.

That's a UI because I thought, oh my God, he's actually figured out something that literally

everyone needs.

And he's done it in a way that is so accessible.

And I like can't wait for this to blow up.

So the thing that you are attempting to replace is the performance review.

Can we talk about the performance review to kick us off?

Because you've done a few conversations about this book.

I don't want to say all the same things you've said on the other ones.

We're going to do a little different.

So we're just going to jump right into that.

Love it.

Love it.

And I'll start off by saying and I'm going to answer the question about the performance review

because I love talking about that horrible, horrible thing.

But the bigger umbrella is performance management is broken.

Yeah.

It was a study that Mercer Group did a study and found that only 2% of leaders believe their performance

management processes add significant value.

And yet we keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Can you give me that stat again?

Yeah, only 2% of leaders believe their performance management processes were adding significant value.

Folks, that means 98%.

Do not think that the way that they are doing things now is adding significant value to the company.

And yet, and yet we keep banging our heads against the wall.

So back to the annual performance review.

Yeah.

That is something I'm old.

I'm turning 60 by the time you're listening to this, I will be 61.

And so I've been around the block a few times.

And annual performance reviews have been a thing since way before my time.

I have clients that I begin my work with.

And they're like, oh, we're so glad you're coming on board.

We know you're all about people.

In fact, you know, we're working right now to implement a new annual performance review.

And I'm like, oh, I think I'm going to throw up.

People think like there are companies that don't do it.

And they kick themselves or not doing it.

And I believe annual performance reviews are the worst invention ever created in business.

Now imagine this.

So imagine you are coaching a sports team.

I'm going to, it's basketball season right now as we're recording this.

So I'm going to pick basketball.

And imagine you're a basketball coach.

And you've got somebody on your team that all year.

His shot is off or her shot is off.

The defense is a step too slow.

Just having a really, really bad here.

So of course, what I'm going to do is I'm going to wait until the end of basketball season.

To sit down with that person and let them know what they're doing wrong so they can do better next season.

How does that sound as a good coach?

It's ridiculous.

It's ridiculous.

And yet that's what we do.

And on top of that, we kind of, we had salt to the wound and not now.

Now I'm sure people are having informal conversations throughout the year.

I'm exaggerating slightly.

But why wait until the end of the year to have the important conversation about what someone's doing well,

what someone's doing not well, you know, what someone's not doing well,

what their goal should be for the upcoming year.

And salt on the wound is there's something that's two other things we do.

When during the annual performance review, one may not be during,

but it happens at the same time.

It's not only am I going to give you a performance review way too late in the game,

but I'm also going to tell you what your rating is this year.

Okay, this year, you're a three out of four.

And you're sitting there.

That's never happened.

Yeah, I kicked ass all year.

I should have been a four.

And you're now feeling defensive that you should have been a four.

And I gave you three.

And there's another reason you're defensive other than you just think you're a lot better than than I do.

The other reason you're defensive is because you also know what happens around the same time of year bonuses,

salary adjustments and bonuses.

So of course me giving you a three instead of a four is going to mean less money in your bank account.

So instead of us, even even with the horror of doing it once a year.

And by the way, if you're listening and you're saying, that's why we do quarterly performance reviews.

Congratulations.

You do a crappy process four times a year.

But not only are we waiting too long to have the conversations,

but then they become very defensive conversations because you're kind of,

you're trying to defend your work versus us having a real conversation about performance.

So, you know, I believe and there's a whole process I recommend,

which can't I'll leave up to you whether we dig in, but,

but there is a specific process that I implement with my clients,

which allows those conversations in a structured way to have those conversations happening throughout the year.

So,

when you first gave me that stat or when I might either I don't know whether I saw it in the book first or I heard it on the podcast first,

I thought to myself,

98% of people don't think that this is good.

But we're still doing it and mostly because we don't have another option.

I was just actually we were watching the playoff games football last night.

And who's the quarterback for the 49ers?

Pretty.

Nope. That's not the game that I was watching.

You're talking about the guy played really bad or the other played really well.

CJ Strauss.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we were watching that game and I he was, you know, fallen apart in the first half.

And I said to my husband, oh, I hope like they can I don't really care who wins that game because they're neither.

They're not my teams.

But I said to my husband, oh, I hope they can like they have somebody that can get to him in the half hour in between because, you know, we've,

I'm a Patriots girl and you've seen Tom Brady have a really shitty first half of a game.

And then the second half he comes out, he's a completely different person.

Like you can see it on his face. You can see it the way he stands.

He's he's totally left it behind. He's a different person.

He's focused. He's ready to go.

I thought, you know, they they can do that if they have the right person.

And if they know how to have the right conversations and he came out in the second half and he looked worse than he did in the first half.

And I thought, well, this is the same problem.

Like you're saying, you can't wait until the end.

You can't wait till the end of the season or the end of the year.

You can't even wait till the end of the game.

You can't and it's not only the

assess performance piece of what we're talking about.

The process really needs to start with if you are a leader,

you need to make sure that you are aligned with every with each of your direct reports as to what your expectations are for their performance.

I can't tell you how many times I see individuals that are surprised when they hear they're not performing well or frankly the opposite surprise that they are performing well.

And one of the things that I've seen and I repeat over and over to my clients is unclear expectations lead to unacceptable results.

Now notice I didn't say unclear expectations lead to unclear results or performance.

Yeah, they lead to unacceptable results because they're, you know, people.

I am a firm believer that everyone's trying to do the best they can with the resources they have.

I don't believe that they're, you know, leaders, you know, might on bad days look at their team and say this one's lazy.

This one's this I believe anybody wakes up in the morning trying to figure out how they're going to screw things up.

Everybody's trying to do the best they can.

And when we are in crystal clear about our expectations around results around what productivity really means around what culture fit and behaviors are important.

When we are not crystal clear, we're starting off behind we're, you know, we're just use, you know, using football as an analogy, we're, we're starting the first quarter already down 28 to nothing.

When we don't start with expectations and as simple as that sounds, that's a step most leaders miss.

It's something that hit me when you were talking about it because, you know, I'm the president of the NSA New York City chapter this year and I probably was not ready for it on some level.

Right, like it's it's not like this crazy super important, very responsible role.

It's a year and you've got to keep things rolling and then move on, but I am so self driven and self motivated and I make my own internal rules for things that need to get done and I pay attention to processes.

So I know that I know how things are supposed to work that I didn't understand how unclear my expectations were for people until I kept getting more and more questions at our board meetings.

And I was like, how have you not figured that out yet because not everybody's brain works like mine.

And I think that this happens a lot in leadership because the people that get promoted are people that were good at their jobs and they were probably naturally able to like figure some stuff out, put some stuff together, then they get promoted to a leadership position, they don't get clear training because we all know there's not enough leadership training in the workplace.

They assume everybody else is like them.

Absolutely.

And how do I want to explain this so we all know we have all heard companies over and over again say things like people are our greatest asset.

And it's such a hunk of crap like it shouldn't be.

But let me let me let me be clear about that. It shouldn't be we want you to be telling the truth when you say that.

But but but it's a hunk of crap. If people were your greatest asset, then as a leader, your number one priority would be setting expectations for your people assessing performance against those expectations.

Coaching and developing people re recruiting people all of those things would be top priority and they're not for most leaders not because most leaders are bad people not because most leaders don't know how to lead.

I don't frankly I coach a whole lot of people that are way smarter than I am.

So it's not that I figured out some genius thing they haven't figured out.

But reality is as a leader, we are every day hit with with 127 different priorities.

And because of that, we have a tendency to look at our direct reports and do two things that are really, really big mistakes.

One is we look at our best people, our highest performers and we say, thank God, I don't have to worry about them.

And we say things to them like keep up the good work.

Now that doesn't sound like a bad thing. And I'm going to come back to it. We also look at our low performers.

We're like, they're taking up too much of my time. I have to fix them. I have to fix my low performers.

So think about the result of that, which is, hey, when I was a leader, I did a lot of the same stuff.

But think about what happens. So you've got a high performing individual who you leave alone. Thank God for Kate. She's great. I don't have to worry about her.

I'm not challenging Kate to raise the bar. I'm not investing in coaching and mentoring her. I'm not re-recruiting her. I'm not getting her more exposure to the industry.

I'm not doing career planning. I'm saying, I'm going to focus on my problem children. I don't have to worry about Kate.

Now, Kate's good at what she does. She's not going to go from high performing to low performing because I'm ignoring her.

But Kate, if you're on my team and I ignore you, is your performance going to dip?

Of course.

I would say, well, in fact, I think that's being optimistic what I have seen.

And I was part of this when I had a leader say to me, keep up the good work on an annual performance review.

If your best people don't grow with you, they will grow with someone else.

Not only might a high-performer's performance dip, but they may go away and work for your competition.

So think about what happens. I ignore my high-performer, my high-performing folks dip.

What happens with my low-performing folks if I work every day to coaxion develop someone that is not a fit or doesn't have the capabilities within my organization?

Yes, I'm going to get, you know, I'm going to strike it rich every once in a while and someone's going to go from low-performing to high-performing.

But more likely what's going to happen is I'm going to coax someone like crazy.

It's going to be really frustrating for me and for them.

Will their performance improve? Sure it will.

Minimally.

They're going to go from low to high-performing? No, they're probably going to go from unacceptable to barely acceptable.

Yeah.

So now think about what I have.

You lost the high-performer.

Yeah, I have lower high-performing folks, higher low-performing folks.

Congratulations, I now have mediocrity.

Yeah.

I did all that work for mediocrity.

Yeah.

And the challenge is most leaders under-invest in their high-performers and over-invest in their low-performers.

And they do that again, not because they're bad leaders or bad people.

I can remember when I used to write annual performance reviews way back when I was working for somebody else.

I actually had my easiest time writing annual performance reviews for my worst people.

Because if you were a low-performer, all I had to do was pick, you know, what are the three most important, of the 18 things this person is doing wrong?

What are the three that I want them to work on?

And let me help them work on it.

I can do that.

But now I've got Kate working for me who is better and smarter than I am.

How am I going to help her?

I have no idea.

So again, I'm going to focus on my low-performing folks.

So part of what I do in the book and in my coaching is help people figure out what should you be doing when you're spending all that time with your high-performers?

How should you be making the decision as to whether for your low-performing folks you should be coaching them up or do you need to coach them out?

Well, you'd say often that there's this idea of, you know, like high productivity, high performance, which are different things and culture fit and sort of the interplay between those three things.

And when I think it was when at your book launch date, when we were at Barnes & Noble's and you talked about that part quite a bit and it really sunk into me that day that I was like, because the book that I'm writing now is all about match.

And the thing that you were talking about that day was match, not just fit, because fit to me is like, you can have a pair of pants on and a shirt on that both fit, but they don't match.

Like, it's not just fit. It goes a level beyond that. Can you talk about this interplay between productivity, performance and culture fit?

Yeah, performance and productivity are two of these words that get used interchangeably.

And I believe they're different things. In fact, you know, one of the tools that's out there around performance management is this thing called nine box that you might have heard of.

And I think it's overly complicated and the two axes on the nine box and I'll share my two axes are performance and potential.

I look at that word performance. I'm like, what is it? You know, is that, you know, what if someone is really productive, but they're hurting everybody else's performance with their behavior?

Is that is that a high performer? You know, and this thing potential like, doesn't everybody have potential? To me, that's an excuse because for people that haven't performed yet.

So when I to me, the word performance has there are two axes to performance in what I call the talent density assessment framework.

The two axes are productivity and culture fit. Now productivity is not how long and hard someone is working someone may be working long and hard because they're not very productive productivity is about results.

That's it. It's pretty, you know, a simple or complex is that is productivity is about results. And then you look at culture fit.

Culture fit at an umbrella level is this person who may be high or low in productivity. They may be getting results are not getting results.

Culture fits says what impact are they having on the people around them? Someone that's a high culture fit.

Is going to make the people around them better.

All right, pause there a better. What's that pause?

I want everybody to stop and think about this for a second.

He didn't say high culture fit is somebody who aligns with what the company thinks says feels and does.

He did not say that.

Can you say it again? What is culture fit?

So culture fit at the highest most important level is a measure of the impact people have on the folks around them.

They are a high culture fit. If they are making the people around them better.

They are a low culture fit. If they are making the people around them worse.

Now, there are also some companies do this while some companies don't.

There may be a set of core values that go along with it that are non-negotiable behaviors that make up culture fit.

But to your point, the right core values is not everybody thinks alike.

That means you all have the same blind spots. You are all going to make the same mistakes.

But we need folks that are both highly productive and high in culture fit.

And people say to me, all right, Mike, what do you do about the high performing jerk?

You can say asshole on this show.

I could. But that's question again. What do you do about the high performing jerk?

We could say asshole if it sounds better. We're from New Jersey.

Now, in mind, I get the question, but there's two things wrong with that question.

One is, if someone is not a culture fit, that doesn't mean they're a jerk.

It just may. Now, it might. But more, I think a more productive way to think about it is they're just not a fit for our organization.

They're not a match for what we need to use your word.

You know, it doesn't mean they're a bad person.

Maybe teamwork is something and collaboration is something that is just.

It's just a non-negotiable part of who we are.

And we've got someone who is just crazy smart, but they want to be in the corner by themselves curing cancer

because that's the way they work best.

There may be a great environment for them.

But we're not a great environment.

So two problems with that high performing asshole question.

One is because you're not living the culture. Does it mean you're a jerk or an ass?

The other is, in my model, it's impossible to be a high performing jerk.

Because performance does not equal productivity.

You could be highly productive jerk, but performance is both culture fit and productivity.

And in my model, even if you are a highly productive, if you're a bad culture fit,

you're what I call a low culture fit team member,

and you either need to be coached up or out.

It's not we're going to deal with your bad behavior that's hurting everybody else

because you're our best salesperson.

No, that's not good enough. You need to be living our culture.

So I just heard some people say, yeah, but if we lose our best salesperson,

then we're going to lose 50% of our sales every year. We can't do that.

That conversation comes up as you can imagine all the time.

And in fact, a quick quick story I was working with a software company.

And they have their set of core values.

And we were doing the talent assessment using this model.

And by the way, this model we're talking about,

I do quarterly with all my clients. We have a quarterly talent assessment.

And we're making decisions on performance and actions we should be taking

and holding folks accountable. It's called the quarterly talent assessment meeting.

And their number two salesperson,

if it was number one, it would have been a better story.

But I'm going to be honest. It was their number two.

But they did have 35 salespeople.

So number two is.

So it wasn't two out of two.

Right. One two out of two. Thank you.

So their number two salesperson was being assessed.

And the VP of sales was saying,

you know, really good at selling,

but very disrespectful to the customer service team,

not collaborative with the other salespeople.

Always very pessimistic.

And the CEO jumps in and says, hold on.

I know where this is leading.

And Mike, I know you're going to ask the question,

are we coaching up or coaching out?

But I am telling you right now,

that I am not even having this conversation with my number two salesperson,

we need the revenue.

Let's move on.

It was silence in the room.

And I said, and the rest of the team was kind of afraid to say something to the leaders in the room.

And I said, okay, I said, I get it.

I'm not going to argue.

But what I am going to coach you to do is all of those core values,

posters you have all over the office.

And all the bling you have with the core values on it and website and everything else.

My recommendation is please get rid of all that stuff.

Because if you allow your highly productive team members

to be a bad culture fit to hurt the people around them.

But your lower productivity,

your people lower in productivity,

those folks are going to wind up getting fired for not living the culture.

Then your core values and everything you say about your culture just becomes a hammer you use

to hit low productivity people.

Now with that, the rest of the leadership team jumped in and basically attacked the CEO

and said, we've got to think about it differently.

The CEO backed off.

They made the decision to give that person one more chance.

And then it wound up coaching him out of the organization.

And yes, they coached out the number two salesperson.

But everybody else's productivity around them jumped up,

including folks not even in sales.

And they all looked at each other and said, why didn't we do this a year ago?

So folks, for those of you who don't know in the world of burnout,

there are six workplace factors that can create a vulnerability to work out in your workers.

One of the top six is a mismatch of values.

And that mismatch of values is not necessarily between you and the person working for you.

But it can be between and the most common problem I see in the values world is between the values you assert

and the values you act as a company, as an organization.

So the idea, this idea that you'd have to pull them off the wall, this appeals to me,

because it's very clear in all the research that if a company does not act,

it's chosen values.

Then the vulnerability to burn up goes up drastically across the entire company from janitor to CEO.

Every single position is at risk because you as a company are not living according to your own values

that you chose in a board meeting two years ago.

And by the way, when I say they decided to fire this person and everybody else is prodiging,

like to me, that's only a partial happy ending to the story.

I don't think the story has a happy ending.

In fact, I know because I worked with them for a while after this.

Think about the impact that CEO had on the rest of the leadership team in that moment,

because to your point, those, that culture that they thought they were trying to create,

those non-negotiable core values that they all thought they had aligned on,

they all realized in that moment to the CEO, those were just words.

But at the end of the day, if someone was bringing in the revenue, those words mattered less.

That mismatch.

Yeah, exactly.

And this story I'm telling you is about a five-year-old story.

It still impacts their culture today.

Because it takes years to build a culture.

You can tear it down in five minutes.

Yeah.

And it becomes super, super important.

And by the way, when there is a true mismatch of values or a mismatch of capabilities.

Yeah.

That the one of the big mistakes I see, I mentioned what big mistake is people kind of,

you know, underinvest in their highest performers.

The other big mistake I see that gets back to this idea of the mismatch

is we keep low-performing folks.

And by low-performing, I either mean their low-in productivity

and or their low-in culture fit could be either one of those.

Leaders keep those low-performing folks around way too long.

I get involved in, I'm like, well, how long has this been going on?

Oh, like a year and a half.

Like, that's leadership, malpractice.

What do you mean it's been going on a year and a half?

And one of the biggest reasons why that happens other than, you know,

a fear of having the difficult conversation and a fear of being short staff

when I lose this person, those are all real.

But the other thing that happens is we hang on to people

out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to them.

So here's what I mean by that.

We think we're being good human beings by saying,

I'm going to give them another chance, I'm going to give them another chance,

I'm going to give them another chance.

And part of the reason why I don't think that makes us a good human being

is because every chance you're giving them, they're hurting the company,

they're hurting your team, they're hurting you, they're hurting your clients.

And they're not helping themselves either.

That's the key.

What you just said.

Now, I want to dig into that because that's absolutely where I was going.

Where I'm going, Kate, is, you know, when I get out and I do my keynotes

or my workshops, I'm, I'm going through all of these concepts.

And then I put a slide up there and I say, everyone has the ability to be a superstar.

I say, everyone can be a superstar.

And I look at the audience and I say, how many of you believe this?

And at that moment, I know I've just lost half the audience who's saying,

you know, I trusted this little guy from Jersey until now.

But come on, this is bullshit.

Everybody, like, what planet are we living up that everybody can be a superstar?

But then I hit my clicker and I go to the next, the next part of the slide

and the word somewhere comes up.

So now it says, everyone can be a superstar somewhere.

Yeah.

And people go, oh, and I believe that not only is a leader,

I believe it is a father.

So Kate, you know my, my son who's now 31 years old.

I have a son with Asperger's syndrome.

And for those that don't know what that is, it's on the autism spectrum.

So I can remember years ago, I saw a story that one of the high tech companies

was hiring only autistic adults to do all of their system testing to test their code.

Because those folks way more than any of us, unless any of you listening are on the spectrum,

those folks had an unbelievable ability to hyper focus on the same thing over and over again

and look for small changes.

So you take that and you realize that when we hang on to people

that don't have the capability to do what we need them to do or it's a mismatch in values,

we're actually holding them back from going somewhere where they can excel.

Now I'm not suggesting when we fire them, they're going to thank us for it.

But I do think for a lot of people a year later, two years later,

and I've seen it, they will thank us for it.

Yeah.

Because we free them up to go do something where they can actually do a great job.

Trust me, as upset and unhappy and frustrated as you are with their performance,

they're not feeling any better than you do.

Yeah.

Why are we holding on to them when we're not only hurting us and our team, but we're hurting them?

And I read something recently and you said that the word potential earlier that a company

was using that as one of their metrics.

And I thought, gosh, what a terrible metric to use.

That's a terrible metric.

And it's actually, there was a study done that shows that the potential we see in other people

is a direct reflection of the potential we believe that we have in their situation.

It actually doesn't have anything to do with them.

So when we're talking about potential, we are all talking about ourselves,

which is like so messed up.

But that also means that if you're using potential as a metric and you have somebody

that really strongly believes in their own capacity and capabilities,

they're going to see everyone as like having, right?

Like as having this super high potential.

I remember one of my best friends and his boyfriend broke up.

This was probably a decade ago.

And we're having all these conversations and he kept talking about, yeah, but his potential, his potential.

And I stopped and I was like, babe, you can't stay with somebody for the person that they are not yet.

And he looked at me and we both like stopped for a second.

And he was like, oh, shit, he's never going to get there.

Is he?

And I was like, no.

It's a great way to think of it.

You almost think like imagine, you know, someone's about to get married.

And it's like, oh, so that's not great.

So why are you marrying him?

Because I think he's got great potential.

Like immediately your mind would go, oh, shit, you're in trouble.

I'm marrying him because I think I can change him into the person he needs to be.

Oh, gross.

And by the way, let me be clear, I do that.

I believe everyone has potential.

So to me, this one has more potential.

This one has less potential.

Now, I think there is, there is a very important place for that kind of conversation when I am working with my leadership teams on assessing performance of folks.

And we're looking on it, not on potential, but on productivity and on culture fit.

There are folks that we look at and we say, OK, of, of these next direct reports, who, who here do we think has the highest potential to be sitting around this leadership team table a year from now?

Like there are folks that you look at and say they're, they're showing, they have shown a great potential in this area.

And therefore, I'm going to work with them a little bit more to get them here, but it's not, but we're not, we're not measuring potential on the scale of one to 10.

And it's not one of the major measures.

It's productivity and culture fit.

Potential is still an interesting, sometimes important conversation to have.

But I think everyone's got potential.

And if you've got someone who's underperforming for, for, for six, nine, 12 months, and you're still saying, yeah, but they've got potential.

You're just making an excuse for someone who's not performing yet.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think when we're using potential, the way that you were saying just now, like I see that this person has shown blah, blah, blah.

I don't think we're talking about potential there.

I think what we're saying is these are the skills that are needed to be good at this job.

This person already has these skills and therefore could be good at this job.

That's not potential. That's, that's skill assessment.

Great point. I agree at thousand percent.

All right. So let's get into the talent density system for a minute.

We already started with step one, set expectations.

You said that in the beginning. And then we've been talking about now step two, assess performance.

So step one, set expectations, step two, assess performance, step three.

Step three is action, which means who gives a rip about our, our assessment of performance unless we're taking action on it.

Right. So with, so in this, I mentioned something called the, the, the quarterly talent assessment meeting earlier in that quarterly talent assessment meeting.

That leadership team is not only assessing performance together.

And I hesitate on the word together or highlight that word together because doing it together is the truth serum.

You can't come in and say all of my, you know, all of my salespeople are high performing when you haven't hit a sales quota as a company in the last five quarters.

So there's a true serum of everybody getting together and sharing and challenging, challenging each other.

But the other part of getting those leaders together is aligning around what are the actions we should be taking.

There is a very specific prescribed set of actions to take with your highest performing team members, whether it is challenging them, raising the bar, giving them more responsibility, career planning, re recruiting.

There's a whole set of actions to have. What should we be doing with our medium performers who can be coached up? Where do we need to change your role?

Do we have places in our organization where good enough isn't good enough? And even though they are mediocre performers, maybe they need to be coached out of the organization.

What action should we be taking with our low performing folks? The actions for low culture fit folks are very different than the actions for your low and productivity folks.

And frankly, your probability of success is very different. If someone is a great fit for your culture, but their low in productivity, they tend at some level to be coachable.

Yeah, coachable to get where you need them to go. I don't know. They may or may not have the capability, but it's some level they're coachable.

But someone who is not living your non-negotiable core values, trying to coach them to live your core values, is like trying to coach someone to become someone they're not.

If you put them on a 90 day performance improvement plan with job threatening consequences, they could fake it for 90 days, and then they're going to go back to who they really are, which is not a bad person, but it's a bad fit.

So this action piece is of all these things, the most important piece. If you're not taking action, none of the rest of it matters.

But this is where, you know, I said earlier, the number one driver of profit growth is people growth. And that as a leader, your number one priority should be taking action with you.

Level one priority should be growing your people. This is where it all happens. If you're not consistently taking action, coaching, developing, coaching up, coaching out, then you're not going to get you're not going to get where you need to go, and you're not going to have the right team around you.

I think this point about the low culture fit person being likely less coachable because it's just a fit and a lack of match, a lack of fit is just a lack of a lack of fit doesn't have to have any morality attached to it, like you were saying earlier.

And to me, we go back to this point about a culture for being someone who positively impacts the people around them and doesn't negatively impact the people around them.

So having somebody that's a low culture fit that negatively impacts the people around them, just the act of not acting on that person throws morale into the toilet.

And your highest performance, say, why am I working so hard?

Right. Every single person that I've spoken to that's been through burnout has had somebody in their company like this that their company refused to move.

And that destroyed the morale and the feelings and the desire and the drive and the engagement for the whole damn team, because they were a bad fit.

Yeah, the other thing that becomes important and it gets to the next step, the fourth step, which is accountability is an accountability includes a lot of things, but I'm going to focus on one, which is measurement.

So think about that statement. I've said a couple times now, the number and driver of profit growth is people growth.

People nod their head. That makes sense. I agree with that. But the problem with it is there's this cliche that you can't manage what you don't measure.

And I think it's a cliche because it's true a lot of the time. Well, do we measure profit growth? Of course we do.

I ask a leader, they know to the 10th of a percent how they're doing compared to last year, how they're doing compared to plan.

But then I say, how are you doing on people growth? And I get answers like, we're pretty good.

We're almost caught up in our annual performance reviews. There's no measure there. And I'm interested how you think this might affect burnout.

The fact that, you know, to me, a measure tells us whether we're winning the race. It tells us where the finish line is.

And if we feel like we're working hard and we're working hard and we're working harder and we're working harder and we're not sure whether we're getting anywhere close to where we need to be.

That can't be good for us mentally. So the idea of having a measure and I've created a measure called the talent density indicator.

And it's very simple but incredibly powerful one where in my framework and we've kind of alluded to this, there are four different levels of performance.

If you're high in both culture fit and productivity, you're high performing. If you are low in culture fit, you're low culture fit.

If you're very low in productivity, you're low producing. And if you're not high enough to be high performing or low enough to be in one of those two low performing categories, you're medium performing.

It's not rocket science. But this idea of the TDI, the talent density indicator is a calculation that says of the folks you're on your team.

What percent the percent high performing minus the percent low performing.

And if you think about that math, that number can go anywhere from negative 100% if you have all low performing individuals on your team to positive 100% if you have all high performing and obviously anywhere in the middle.

And we use that measure as a benchmark, we could benchmark the company levels of the leadership team, sales versus marketing, you know, the TDI for a leader.

But now you've got a benchmark and you can say, okay, all these actions I need to take are to improve that number. And as the number goes up or the number goes down, we try to understand why it's happening and what we need to do differently.

And it gives us not only a way to hold each other accountable, but a way for all of us to have some sense again, whether we're winning or losing the race or whether we're just working really hard every day and not really knowing how we're doing.

And this is my favorite part. This is the genius piece that I think is like so dang useful. And one of the reasons that I explicitly love this system is because it's a measure of the company as a whole.

Each person has to be measured and scaled out right like so yeah, high performer high below performer this way, you know, low producing whatever low culture fit blah blah blah.

But the number is for the company, which means that it can't be weaponized against people.

So I think a lot of times like I was thinking about creating a burnout assessment in a company and every I was every time I was creating it and I've over the past 10 years I've tried to do this like eight times.

And I've used AI and I've not used AI and I've talked to college professors and I've done I mean I've tried this a million ways.

But every time I do it, I come to this place where I think yeah, but this ends up being about the individual and this can be used against the individual.

This system when you're talking about the talent density indicator overall for a company.

It's not about an individual yes, you might need to coach out some low performers that they might need to coach out some low culture fits absolutely.

However, it's not a oh, you're dangerous for us because you don't handle stress well.

So we got to get rid of you. It's like no, you're not a fit for us for all of these reasons and this makes more sense.

For me, it's like a it's an honest but gentle and company level number that the company can look at as a whole altogether is what makes it makes it so impactful I think.

It is and then you'll tell me whether this end is going to contradict what you said about being able to weaponize it and I'm interested in your thoughts on it.

It's a company level number, but I also recommend that each leader is accountable for the TDI on their team sure company level number.

But I believe one of the key performance indicators and I talk about leading and lagging indicators, a lagging indicator is the measure of a result.

So anything on the PNL is a result revenue profitability gross margin blah blah blah.

A leading indicator is the measure of an activity that drives a result. I believe the TDI is the mother of all leading indicators.

Because if you drive people growth, you're going to see profit growth, you're going to see the results and I do think each leader should be measured on the TDI of their team, not the absolute number necessarily.

But if you're a leader on my team, I want to see that you're trending for the most part that your TDI is trending now I say for the most part because what happens is when you get a lot of high performing folks, you may challenge them and raise the bar and your TDI may go down slightly because you're raising the bar and that's good.

So I don't think that's what you mean by weaponizing it, but it's, but it's a number that you could look at by leader by function by level of an organization to hold everyone accountable for growing their people.

But it's a way that everybody can understand and it's not based on like your design as a person necessarily like a low culture fit is about who you are, but like you know that you're a low culture fit too.

It's not a secret and if everybody knows this language and everybody knows what we're looking for, then it becomes a really fair assessment overall and I think in the world of mental health with burnout and how how resilient somebody is in certain circumstances and how many resources they need and that is really easy to weaponize my stuff.

Your stuff is not so easy to weaponize, especially if everyone knows and then we're back to we haven't gotten to step five, but we were back to set expectations when we're in the accountability section like those things wrap back around and if everybody knows what the expectations are and everybody knows what the language is.

Yeah, it just becomes fact instead there's no opinion in it, I guess is the point it's it's just this is where you are based on the measure and part of what part of what helps it become fact is is absolutely starts with having expectation versus just I think they're highly productive know how are they doing against their productivity measures, but the fact that the leaders do this assessment together.

Yeah, I can bullshit on each other and it's not just calling bullshit what you see very often is you know you've got members of your team, especially around culture fit productivity is a fact.

Yeah, you know it's it's results, but culture fit is while I try to make it more science than than art and make it more factual hey culture fit is going to be at some level qualitative.

But what makes it more fact based is having those other members of the team yeah that could not only call bullshit because that assumes you're not telling the truth, but they help you because your team members when you're the leader they probably treat you pretty well.

What you don't see is how they treat other people so having the rest of the leadership team in the room that says well yeah you're there boss so of course they're optimistic with you and their collaborative with you, but let me tell you what it looks like when they work with the operations team because it ain't that pretty yeah.

That kind of accountability and you know making that that assessment more accurate versus just being weaponized or all qualitative makes it makes it a lot more useful.

Well, and I think the idea of like is this person in general helping everybody around them be better or not is pretty clear.

But you can have you will have different opinions on that yeah right someone who is you know someone someone could say well this person is is rude and there's no tact and they they they're disrespectful talking about me.

And and someone else might say I love how direct and to the point they are yeah yeah right so that's where you know it's it's not like you know there's going to be a consensus.

That's why yeah, but there's got to be there's a consensus yeah typically over an overall consensus and I think that's important so we have expectations assess performance act to drive accountability step five we're going slightly over time but we're just going to go with it.

Unless you have a call.

Oh my God I got to go buy step five is cascading this whole process down through the organization and you know when I do this I always start this.

This whole process with the senior leadership team and only the senior leadership team which means that the senior leaders are excess or are assessing performance of their direct reports one level down.

Now, the reason why this cascade became a fifth step is because I've seen it really screwed up.

And here's what could happen. I have, the good news is I have leadership teams, they all,

they fall in love with this process. This is amazing. We've never accurately assessed people like

this. We're taking better action. We see better performance. We're having these great conversations

with each other, all that stuff. Therefore, let's do this down throughout the entire organization.

Let's go from not just to sea level, all of us sea level folks. Let's drive it down to VPs and

drive it down to managers and supervisors and you know, that sounds great. They love my process

and they want to do that. Here's the problem with it. It takes a level of leadership maturity

to do this in an open, honest, vulnerable way. It takes some real forethought pro-activity

to communicate what you're doing in the right way. So here are two different alternative whispers

in the hallway about this process. The first whisper in the hallway is, hey,

could you believe what I found out? You know, our leaders, they get together once a quarter

to figure out who they're going to fire. Could you believe the company we work for?

This is the fear of weaponization. Here's the, here's the second whisper in the hallway.

You know what I just found out? Do you know that our leaders get together once a quarter

and spend time for the sole purpose of figuring out how they could help all of us?

Now, by the way, let's be real. Both of those whispers are true at some level.

Yes, of course. But if you don't, so if you don't cascade this down

in the right way, and in my book I talk about a lot of different kind of change management techniques

to make sure this is communicated in the right way, and you're training people on how to do this

in the right way, that you are helping people understand that this is not a time for them to be

defensive about their team. Because by the way, if as a leader, they're not hitting their KPI's,

but they believe everyone on their team is great, then who's the problem?

The problem's the leader. So like, you're not helping anybody by protecting your people.

What you're doing is you're taking the bullet for everybody else. We can do better than that.

So, so the idea of starting this as a senior leadership team first,

it takes a while to get good at this and be open and honest about it. Do it for two or three

quarters, get it right first, and then very purposefully cascade this down through the organization.

That's an important piece of this whole puzzle. And then it just starts over again.

It loops right back around. So that's absolutely. Yeah, never ends. You're always, you know,

I hope you I pray for your success that you are resetting expectations fairly often.

And especially now, especially now, what the rate of change for businesses now is something like 12

to 18 months, if not faster. It's like, you don't have time to not be reassessing

in setting expectations. You don't have time anymore. This is not 1975 where you had

20, 30 years where you could just sort of chill and do the same thing over and over again.

Like those times are gone. I'm going to push back a little being the old guy in the room.

People always things are changing. But you know what? Things were changing really fast.

You know, I started my career in 1987. Things are always changing fast. I was fine today.

Today, yeah, could I say? Could I wait? Is this on video? Or they see which finger I have up?

Well, that actually, but that that that rate of change shift comes from Nadia. Do you know

Nadia? Is it somebody of us? Yes. Yes. So that's her research, her PhD research.

And she does change management all over the world. And the rate of change has shifted from

something like like a 25 year scale to a 12 to 18 month scale from that time until now.

Like we literally are changing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times faster than we

ever did before. From the beginning of this podcast to the end, I wonder what's changed?

Oh my God. So much. Folks, this is my Goldman. The strength of talent is his book,

The Talent Density Assessment Indicator. Something like that. All those things. That's what he does.

I think that a you should read the book and the book has its own website. You can go to

my Goldman.com. But you can also go to strength of talent. My Dash Goldman. My Dash Goldman.

But you just go to talent. I lost my Goldman to some guy who was on the big brother show in Australia.

He's got my Goldman.com. So I had to get my Dash Goldman.com. So rude. But you could also go to

strength of talent.com. And I have seen Mike speak in front of various size audiences.

He's got something that grabs people. He's got the right charisma. He's got the right rhythm.

He's got the right context. He knows how to. He's great at Q&A. So if you're looking for keynote

speaker or you need books for your organization or you need somebody to come in and do this work,

I very highly recommend my friend Mike. Mike, do you have any parting words?

This was fun. And to every leader out there,

make developing your people your number one priority. You will not be sorry you did.

Amen. All right, Fred fam. Until next time.

Welcome to fry the burnout podcast. I'm your host Kate Dunnevin,

burnout expert keynote speaker and author focused on burnout as a match issue at work.

Fried looks at burnout as information, not failure. When people, roles, expectations,

leadership behaviors, and systems fall out of alignment, burnout is often the signal.

Seasons one through 10 of fried focus primarily on individual burnout and recovery.

And those episodes are still available. You can use the fried episode finder to find the

conversations that best match what you're dealing with right now. Starting in season 11,

the focus shifts to the workplace. The conversation center on how leaders and organizations can

improve match and get rid of burnout in realistic sustainable ways. I also work directly with

companies and events through burnout and emotional intelligence keynotes, workshops, and longer

term advisory work. If burnout has been getting your attention, this podcast will help you understand

what it's pointing to and how to find a better match.